Accelerating the service order: What a concept.

Zarar Rana retired in 2000 shortly after the $400 million sale of his inventory and order management company Objectel to Nortel--but not for long. He’s now back, busy helping carriers tweak that same ordering process as before but with new technology. As co-founder, president and CEO of ConceptWave, Rana has brought his company quickly into the mainstream of OSS with an implementation at Sprint Canada and an OEM agreement with Telcordia Technologies. Recently he discussed his new venture with Telephony Senior Editor Tim McElligott.

You started the ball rolling on ConceptWave in September of 2000. That was not the best of years for launching a company. What were you thinking?

In general, funding a company in a market in distress is always a challenge. But for us it was a very good time to create a company for a number of reasons. We came from a telecom business background and understood the problem we were trying to solve. We also didn’t have a problem with seed money. We had our own. Plus, investors were willing to invest in us whatever we were going to do. They had faith in the team. At the time, the market was favorable to us because we were able to focus on building things instead of selling them. We didn’t have to divert or energies on the sales side. On the other hand, our competition was having a rough time just surviving while we just managed our costs, stayed on the development track and waited for the market recovery. Our approach was to not create any noise in the first three years until we had customers. Now we will start making noise. 

Some experts say the OSS market is already too crowded. Why did you think there was room for one more?

We did see that the market was crowded, but all of the OSS solutions in the market are still too hard to implement. We thought if we had something flexible and easy to deploy, we would still have an area to address. Yankee [Group] said in 2002 that ILECs spent $100 million on order fallout. This area can be fixed through order automation and we proved that with Bell Canada. We asked them if we can give them a solution in 90 days would you buy it. They said, ‘That’s a deal.’ The operational savings was so huge that they didn’t blink in giving us a project. Yes, the market is crowded, but we are not trying to replace existing order entry/order management systems. We would kill ourselves walking into a large organization and saying we are going to replace your Amdocs or your Siebel system. So we looked at the white space, the areas not addressed by the big guys and are providing visibility into those existing systems.

How did your relationship with Telcordia come about?

We have been working with them for over 1.5 years. Basically, I think we approached one of their product managers that saw our tools for building business processes and after a little back and forth with our product manager talking to theirs and seeing there was a need for this kind of solution in one of their product enhancements for a large ILEC, well, the relationship with Telcordia matured. We built a product that is easily configurable to customer requirements without changing code and that can be branded for our partners. That’s worked well for Telcordia when they wanted to replace their exception manager and come out with other products. We built some meta-data on top of our product to make it look exactly like what they were trying to sell. The current pipeline tells me Telcordia will bring quite a decent bit of business.

What is unique about your product?

We are a pure play order manager/order entry company. We have productized the concept of order manager so we can repeat the same solution again and again. It is working well in the Tier 1 market. Lots of vendors say they have order management, activation, inventory etc., but none of the Tier 1 people are spending money on all of it. We found that if we stayed focused in order care, it helps us stay in front of the Tier 1s. In front of the greenfields our competitors were able to make some good headway selling everything in one box, but that model has seriously failed since the CLEC market died and most of those competitors have disappeared. 

From where are you looking for most of your business to come?

Initially wireline, then IP services. Order manager helps to solve problems where multiple systems exist. Wireless is pretty much a stand-alone model, but we can be very good for the new services. So our product will benefit a lot from convergence where wireless, wireline and data are becoming one. In those kinds of environments, our order entry and manager can play an instrumental roll. It can send orders to all kinds of technologies and multiple platforms from a single order entry place.